Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

This post is another in a series based on a partner asking a series of detailed questions about Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. In the first post, I discussed the primary differences between Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2. In this post I’m going to drill down a bit deeper into Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The basic product page from Microsoft for Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is given here.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 has a footprint of almost 2GB (note: this can be compared with VMware ESXi which has a footprint of less than 100MB.) The primary reason for this of course is that Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 carries almost all of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Core around with it. The issue here has to do with attack surface – the larger the code base and the more APIs that code base exposes, the greater the attack surface in terms of defects and exposure for malicious attacks.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 was a big step forward when compared with the initial version of Hyper-V Server 2008; to wit:

The number of processor sockets was increased from 4 to 8.

The number of cores (or logical processors) was increased from 24 to 32.

The supported memory was increased from 32GB to 1TB.

Quick and live virtual machine migration was supported in R2.

Failover clustering for virtual machines was supported in R2 via CSV (Cluster Shared Volumes.) CSV allows NTFS to be used as a cluster file system.

The number of running virtual machines (guest operating systems) was increased from 192 to 256.

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